The Reception of the New Philosophy en Eighteenth-Century Spain

8/13/2019 The Reception of the New Philosophy en Eighteenth-Century Spain

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The Reception of the 'New Philosophy' in Eighteenth-Century SpainAuthor(s): Anthony PagdenSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 51 (1988), pp. 126-140Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/751266.

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THE RECEPTION OF THE 'NEW PHILOSOPHY'IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN*Anthony Pagden

In memoryof Charles B. Schmitt

I

HIS is a history of the attempt, flawed and ultimately unsuccessful, by anintellectual elite in early eighteenth-century Spain to win recognition for whatits members loosely described as the 'New Philosophy'. It is also the history ofthe survival into the eighteenth century of Thomist jusnaturalism, one of the mostpowerful intellectual traditions in Early-Modern Europe. Both the attempt and thesurvival offer some explanation, however partial, as to why what has come to becalled 'the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century' never made muchimpact in Spain.The 'New Philosophy'-la nueva filosofia-describes a set of views on scientificmethod and a set of intellectual, and on occasions social and political, attitudesimplicit in the holding of such views, associated, frequently very loosely, with thephilosophy of Descartes. It was not, however, in any strict sense Cartesianism. AsBenito Jer6nimo Feijoo, the Spanish encyclopaedist, wrote: 'What we call "The NewPhilosophy" is in no way dependent upon the Cartesian system. One may say thatCartesianism is a New Philosophy but not that "The New Philosophy" is Cartesian'.1

In most respects the Spanish New Philosophers were no more eclectic than someof Descartes's French, German or English epigones, though they were clearly ofteneclectic in very different ways. Cartesianism demanded a very radical departurefrom existing methods of cognition which it is difficult for us to understand fully,committed as we have been for the past two hundred years to taking Descartes'sassumptions about the role of philosophy for granted. As Charles Taylor has pointedout, only when we have understood why Descartes demanded that his readers spendan entire month considering the first Meditation will we understand just howstartling both Descartes's sceptical methodology and mind/body dualism were tothe seventeenth-century mind. Even for so sympathetic a chronicler of the NewPhilosophy and its Enlightenment heirs as Feijoo, dualism seemed merely counter-intuitive, 'vain and contrary to all experience'.2 To more orthodox SpaniardsCartesian scepticism and the insistence on the primacy of the self as the object of* An earlier and very primitive version of this essaywas given as a lecture, more years ago than I care toremember, to the Department of the History and

Philosophy of Science of the Queen's University Belfast.I would like to thank my hosts on that occasion, RobertHall and Alan Gabbey, for their observations and crit-

icisms. I would also like to thank Nigel Glendinning forextensive bibliographical assistance.1 Cartas eruditas y curiosas, no. 16, II, Madrid 1758, p.222.2 Quoted by Ramon Cefial, 'Feijoo y la filosof~ia de sutiempo', Pensamiento, xxi, 1965, p. 266.

126Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 51, 1988

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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 127knowledge appeared little short of insane or-which amounted to much the samething-heretical, since what such claims demanded was a complete re-evaluation ofmost of the traditional, Aristotelian assumptions about what it is to describe theworld. What Descartes proposed became, of course, the project of modernphilosophy, the claim that the mind is a mirror reflecting a law-governed nature andthat philosophy is the means by which that mirror is systematically brightened so asto produce increasingly accurate images.3 Cartesianism thus constituted a fullycomprehensive system. Like most other systems, like Copernicanism before andHegelianism after, it could effectively be dismantled and translated into other morefamiliar idioms. But it was equally clear that, no matter into what language theprinciples of the Discours and the Meditations were rendered, the Cartesian rejectionof Aristotelian hylomorphism and the corresponding insistence that all knowledgemust proceed from 'clear and simple' ideas-from the questions posed in the FirstMeditation: 'how do we know that anything which is mental represents anythingwhich is not mental'4-would ultimately promote an empirical rationalism into theplace formerly occupied by theology. The scientific revolution of the seventeenthcentury challenged the authority of the church in a number of crucial and highlysensitive areas (one of which I shall come to shortly); but more generally it reducedthe realm of theology, which previous generations had accepted as the science towhich traditionally 'no argument, no disputation, no topic seems alien',5 to thatarea concerned solely with the relationship between the theos and his creation.The words are those of the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoriawas the first of a group of Spanish neo-Thomists-frequently described in Spain(because all of them had either taught or been educated at one of the colleges ofthe university) as the 'School of Salamanca'-who, from the middle of the sixteenthcentury, dominated the intellectual life of the major Spanish universities.6 The lastof the group, whom Leroy Loemaker has called the teacher of Early-ModernEurope,' was the Jesuit Francisco Suarez, the author, among other works, of the Delegibus ac deo legislatore, one of the most influential natural-law treatises of theseventeenth century. The project to which these men were dedicated was, in themost general terms, the creation of a moral philosophy grounded in a Thomistaccount of the law of nature, the ius naturae, and the reconstruction of theAristotelian virtues upon a base which was both rationalist and naturalist. Theirinfluence was enormous and widespread. Their impact on the work of Descarteshimself was considerable. Leibniz improbably claimed that he could read Suirezwith as much pleasure as most people read novels.8 Locke shared some of hisconcerns and adopted some of his arguments,9 and although the great natural-law

3 The trope is, of course, Richard Rorty's, Philosophyand the Mirror of Nature, Princeton 1979, p. 12.4 Rorty (as in n. 3), pp. 46-7.5 See Anthony Pagden, 'The Preservation of Order:the School of Salamanca and the "Ius Naturae"',

Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal inHonour ofP E. Russell, ed. F. W. Hodcroft, D. G. Pattisonet al., Oxford 1981, pp. 155-65.6 The more general Italian term 'seconda scolastica'provides, however, a better characterization of theircollective historical identity. See La seconda scolastica

nella formazione del diritto privato, ed. Paolo Rossi, Milan1972.7 Leroy Loemaker, Struggle for Synthesis. The Seven-

teenth-Century Background ofLeibniz's Synthesis of Order andFreedom, Cambridge Mass. 1972, p. 119.8 Vita Leibnitii a seipso, in Foucher de Careil, Nouvelleslettres et opuscules inedits de Leibniz, Paris 1857, p. 382.9 On the similarity between Locke's and Suarez'sviews of rights see James Tully, A Discourse on Property,John Locke and his Adversaries, Cambridge 1980, pp.66-68.



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128 ANTHONY PAGDENtheorists of the seventeenth century, Grotius and Puffendorf, pursued other ends,they could never detach themselves entirely from the language or the method-ologies of their Spanish predecessors. By the end of the seventeenth century,however, the main neo-scholastic tradition had atrophied so far that, as one Spanishchampion of the New Philosophy, the Minim friar Juan de Najera claimed, 'even theSorbonne to which it owed both its beginnings and its progress had come to lookupon it with disgust'.10The Protestant jusnaturalists by their rejection of the Aristotelian virtues for aminimal moral philosophy which would be proof against scepticism, and theirconsequent concern with sociability and the historical origins of civil society, weresuccessful in transforming the entire discourse, and by so doing made possible itstranslation into another kind of naturalism, the political economy and the humansciences of the Enlightenment.11 But in Spain itself, where the innovations ofGrotius and Puffendorf were treated as heretical and their works prohibited,scholasticism had become by the middle of the seventeenth century (Suirez died in1617) little more than the stuff of university textbooks and the religious andpolitical ideology of an entrenched and powerful clergy.The universities in Spain in the seventeenth century were thus caught in a webof increasingly overdetermined, decaying scholasticism. In such an intellectualenvironment even the moderate, synthesizing support for Cartesianism of the kindwhich marked the work of a man like Tommaso Cattaneo at Padua was rare, andrarely if ever practised openly.12 Descartes does seem to have found some readerswithin the Spanish universities. For example by 1683 Jose Perez, who held the chairof astronomy at Salamanca, had read Descartes's Traits du monde ou de la lumiere (firstprinted in 1633) as well as Hobbes, but, as he pointed out, these works were 'hard tocome by and prohibited in Spain', and he had only been able to consult them 'byspecial dispensation from the Inquisition'.13 Similarly Luis Rodriguez de Pedrosa, adoctor and contemporary of Perez's at Salamanca, seems to have read bothDescartes and Gassendi (though exactly what he read and how much he understoodit is not easy to say) and to have been, in private, an outspoken champion of theNew Philosophy.14 But even he admitted that he was afraid to voice his views inpublic for fear of censure.At one immediate level, these New Philosophers challenged the culturalhegemony of the traditional academic institutions because their concerns, howevercautiously pursued, by privileging experience and individual cognition overexegesis, clearly constituted a threat to the system of text-based knowledge on whichlate scholasticism relied. As the somewhat rebarbative Sevillian doctor Martin10 Desengaiios philos6phicos, Seville 1737, p. 45.11 On the language of Grotius and Puffendorf seeRichard Tuck, 'The "Modern" Theory of Natural Law',The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe,ed. Anthony Pagden, Cambridge 1987, pp. 99-122; andon the transition from natural jurisprudence to political

economy, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, 'Needsand Justice in the Wealth of Nations: an introductoryessay', Wealth and Virtue, the Shaping ofPolitical Economy inthe Scottish Enlightenment, eds Hont and Ignatieff,Cambridge 1983, pp. 1-44.

12 See Eugenio Garin, 'Cartesio e l'Italia', Giornalecritico dellafilosofia italiana, iv, 1956, pp. 385-405.13 Quoted in Ramon Cefial, 'Cartesianismo en Espafia,notas para su historia', Filosofia y letras (Universidad deOviedo), 1945, pp. 28-9. This is still the only com-prehensive summary of Descartes's influence in Spain.14 Selectarum philosophiae et medicinae difficultatum ...tomus primus, Salamanca 1666, pp. 80-3. On the genesisof this work see Cefial (as in n. 13), p. 26.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 129Martinez remarked of his colleagues, 'the university and its professors [behave] as ifthe reputation of the Schools consisted in obstinacy and bad teaching-methods'.15But the most alarming aspect of the new ideas was the threat they offered, orseemed to offer, to the whole notion of an authoritative system of knowledge whichlay wholly within the control of the Church. 'Certainly', wrote Juan de Espinosa, theMercedarian censor of Najera's Desenganos philosophicos, 'the freedom to discussmatters of philosophy has grown so reckless that, without respect for the HolyFathers or the famous doctors of antiquity, each man invents a new system or digsup whichever old one happens to take his fancy so that knowledge (scientia) has nowbecome a confused Babel in which everyone speaks his own language and no-onecan understand what his neighbour is saying'.16 The linguistic metaphor was an aptone. Without the authoritative discourse which the scholastics had built into socomplex a structure that it could embrace the whole world of experience, allthought would stumble back into the conceptual anarchy of Babel, into a world inwhich philosophical and even theological vocabularies would be emptied of theassured and certain meaning that the authorities had guaranteed for them. It wasthis that the scholastics most feared. Descartes's initial claims, as they understoodthem, that all knowledge had to proceed from 'clear and simple' ideas might not be,as the Spanish Cartesians who were eager to avoid total censure would sometimesargue, so very different from the Thomist claim that all the strategies by which wearrive at any knowledge of what is right or wrong in human behaviour derive fromthe rational mind operating upon the prima praecepta of the law of nature. But forthe scholastic the accuracy of whatever deductions the rational mind might makedepends for verification upon the consensus and that could only be registered in arestricted body of texts-'the Holy Fathers and the famous doctors ofantiquity'-and in the normative practices of the Christian community. Whereas forDescartes, of course, the certainty of the conclusions of science could only beevaluated from a position of extreme epistemological scepticism. Even Feijoo, whofirmly believed that it was possible to be a Cartesian and a good Christian, couldnever come to accept the cogito since, as he rightly pointed out, faith 'forbids, evenfor a brief minute, any act of doubt concerning revealed truth'."17For the scholastics,then, the struggle between the old and the new philosophies was immediatelytranslated out of a discussion over method, which is where the Cartesians wished tolocate it, into a discussion over the status of certain authorities, most prominentlyAristotle. For many of the Spanish opponents of Cartesianism, indeed, the NewPhilosophy could be characterized simply, if polemically, as anti-Aristotelianism andhence potentially, at least, heretical or atheistic. As the doctor Diego Mateo Zapata(1664-1745)-to whom I shall return-remarked, 'Aristotle has achieved suchstatus in Spain that anyone who abandons the maxims and sentences of this oracle isheld to have lost all reason and judgment'.'18

15 Philosophia sc~iptica extracta de la physica antigua ymoderna recopilada en didlogo entre un Aristotelico,Cartesiano, Gassendisto y Sctptico para la instrucci6n de lacuriosidad Espaitola, Seville 1730, p. 297. Martinez wasalso a member of the Regia Sociedad de Medicina; seepp. 131-133 below.

16 Najera (as in n. 10), p. 2.17 B.J. Feijoo, Teatro critico universal, Ii, Madrid 1777, p.20.18 Ocaso de las formas aristotelicas que pretendio ilustrar ala luz de la raz6n el D. Juan Martin de Lessaca. Obrapostuma

delDoctorDiego Matteo Zapata, i, Madrid 1745, fol. 3v.



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130 ANTHONY PAGDENII

There were, however, other more immediately substantive arguments over whichanyone who could claim to be a 'New Philosopher' diverged widely from theAristotelians. The principal of these, and it became perhaps the crucial issue in thelate seventeenth century, was the challenge which Cartesian physics and Gassendianatomism, with which it was closely associated and frequently confused, offered to thepossibility of belief in transubstantiation. 'Our Spanish Aristotelians', wrote Feijoowith mingled irritation and despair, 'know nothing of this philosopher save that hedenies the existence of accidents' and that his physics, as well as his epistemology, istherefore 'incompatible with what the Faith teaches us about the sacrament of theEucharist'.19 Not surprisingly, it was this issue which dominated much of the NewPhilosophers' attempts to defend their thinking from accusations of heresy. By themiddle of the seventeenth century the doctrine of the Eucharist had become thecentral article of faith in the Counter-Reformation Church. But a belief intransubstantiation relied upon a belief in the Aristotelian distinction betweenaccidents-taste, touch, smell, for example-and essences. The consecrated waferwhich the supplicant eats has all the properties of Christ's flesh, real and substantial,but the accidents are clearly those of flour and water. Both Cartesian physics andatomism denied the existence of sense qualities or real accidents. Accidents aremerely effects produced upon the senses by external objects and cannot beseparated from them. If it is bread I appear to be eating, then it must be bread-orsome substance which resembles bread-which I am eating. It is certainly nothuman flesh. More difficult still, it is clearly impossible under this account to acceptthe existence of a substance whose externals remain unchanging, but whoseproperties may be radically transformed. Both Descartes himself and Galileo, whoseII Saggiatorewas a predominantly atomistic treatise, had run into difficulties with thetheologians on this point.2" Descartes, in an attempt to save the phenomenon oftransubstantiation, argued that since sensation depends upon contact between thesingle particles of a body and the particles which surround it, there was no reasonwhy the resemblance of bread should not remain unchanged during the miraclesince this was restricted to what he called the 'superficies' of the Eucharist. 'Christ atthe moment of transubstantiation', he claimed, 'is contained within thesesuperficies, not in the proper sense of being in a place but sacramentally and withthat form of existence which, though we have difficulty in expressing it in words, yetwhen our thought is illuminated by faith we can still believe to be possible by Godand ought always firmly so to believe'."21 This convinced few of Descartes'sopponents. By shifting the language of explanation from physics to theology andback again, seeming to deny the co-extension of time and space, and finally

19 Feijoo (as in n. 17), II, pp. 17, 20.20 See Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico, Turin 1983, who

claims that it was his atomism rather than his support ofthe heliocentric theory which led to Galileo's con-demnation.21 'Reply to the fourth set of objections [to the FirstMeditations]', in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, eds

E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, II, Cambridge 1970, pp.118-122. The best account of the debate is in J.-R.Armogathe, Theologia cartesiana, I'explication physique del'Eucharestie chez DESCARTES et dom DESGABETS, TheHague 1977.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 131referring the whole problem to a definition of the sacramental, it appeared to mostchurchmen to be a thinly disguised attempt to smuggle in an anagogical explan-ation for what the Church firmly maintained was a physical reality. It was also, asMersenne had warned Descartes in 1642, uncomfortably close to some of Wyclif'sobservations on the nature of the Eucharist.22 In the end anything other than totalacceptance of the Church's ruling on the matter was bound to fail. If Descarteshimself had escaped condemnation of the kind handed out to Galileo, he wasnevertheless unable to prevent his works from appearing on the Index in 1663.Spaniards who found some kind of synthesis between Cartesianism and atomismattractive were pushed to even further limits of absurdity in their attempts to avertthe charge of heresy. One of the earliest, Luis Alderete y Soto, went so far as to positthe existence of two distinct worlds, apparently identical in every detail, except thatone is built of atoms, the other, of a 'spiritual substance'. Man lives out his dailyexistence in the first material and atomistic world. But from the moment he takesthe Eucharist until the moment his stomach begins to digest the atoms of which thematerial substance of the bread is composed, he passes over into the second world.23This was not a widely discussed solution of the problem.

III

The first self-declared 'New Philosophers' in Spain were a group of provincialdoctors who, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, met in Seville in thehouse of the doctor Julio Muiioz Pirez, medicode cadmarao the King, to form a soci-ety whose purpose was 'to practise experimental philosophy to which end theyavailed themselves of the best authors acquired by their personal diligence throughthe medium of many foreign enthusiasts (aficionados)'.24 Seville was still, despite thecollapse of the American trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, therichest mercantile city in Spain. Descartes's views on causation, his experiments insensation, his writings on psychology all had far-reaching medical implications.Doctors could also find patrons outside the university system and, if they weresuccessful, those patrons were likely to protect them whatever their views. TheSpanish nobility, like the nobility everywhere, wished to be cured of its diseases. If adoctor could achieve that, or apparently do so, then he could be confident offinding some measure of support in his struggle both with the theologians and withthe academic doctors who could cure no-one. The aims of the new society wereexplicitly to study all forms of experimental science to-as its most vocal championMateo Zapata declared-'unravel the admirable secrets of the Great Book of Naturewith repeated experiments in Philosophy, Medicine, Chemistry and Anatomy, andwith the prospect of discovering specific remedies'.25 The project was to rejuvenate22 Redondi (as in n. 20), p. 359.23 Crisola de la verdad ilustrada con divinas y humanas

letras, Padres y Doctores de la Iglesia, Madrid 1683, pp. 11,21.24 Quoted in Francisco de las Barras de Aragon, 'La

regia sociedad de medicina y ciencias de Sevilla y el

doctor Cervi', Boletin de la Universidad de Madrid, II,1930, p. 355.25 Diego Mateo Zapata, Papeles vadnos,Seville UniversityLibrary, MS 111-12-3 no. 33, address to the Regia Soci-edad delivered on 30 June 1701, fol. 2r. Zapata had not,however, always been a supporter of the New Philo-



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132 ANTHONY PAGDENthe sciences which had been reduced to the tired repetition of scholastic jargon,and this was to be achieved through the application of Baconian empiricism. Thehuman body, declared Zapata, is 'an admirable artificial machine' whose structureand function could only be understood by the application of covering laws arrivedat by induction.26 The (as he phrased it) 'metaphysical study' on which themembers of the medical faculties of the Spanish university spent their time, the'idolatry of the ancient and uncertain opinion based on the four humours,elements, qualities', was not only worthless; it had 'sterilized medicine' and'perturbed and perverted medical practice'."27The society's immediate success wasconsiderable. Its members corresponded with their colleagues in the Acad~mie desSciences and the Royal Society, with members of the court, and even with some ofthe more progressive university professors. Its presence and its declared ambitionsalso aroused the immediate hostility of the medical faculty of the University ofSeville which demanded that the Crown put an end to these dangerous proceed-ings. The now ailing half-mad Charles II duly consulted the Council of Castile andhis own medical advisers. The court physicians, the royal protomedicato, wereevidently sympathetic to the aims of the society and they advised the Crown torecognize rather than forbid it. On 25 May 1700, shortly before his death, Charleselevated this provincial salon into a royal society, the Regia Sociedad de Medicina.28On 8 June the now angry and incredulous Sevillian Galenists wrote to the Universityof Osuna asking for support against 'the introduction into this city of a society orsalon intent on teaching modern doctrines composed of Cartesians, paraphysiciansand others, Dutchmen and Englishmen whose aim seems to be to destroy the fameof Aristotle so highly regarded in the Roman Catholic Schools, and also to degradethe teachings of Hippocrates and Galen which are current in all universities.' Theinfluence of the society, they went on, had already spread to C6rdoba, Madrid andother places, while the Royal Council remained deaf to the warnings of therighteous about 'the grave dangers that will result to the commonweal and theuniversities, especially in matters of religion' from the introduction of doctrineswhich had long ago been condemned as heretical but which had now sprung upagain 'in the guise of the New Philosophy and medicine'.29As Zapata observed, this response was typical of those who condemn things 'onlybecause they are not ancient, thus making idolatry out of what is only opinion'."3 Inits insistence that the New Philosophy was not so much new philosophyas old familiarheresy, it was typical too of the Church's response to any threatened disturbance ofthe intellectual consensus. Josi Francisco de Isla's satire on scholastic reactioncaught the hysterical tone of many of the opponents of the New Philosophy.'Heretics, Atheists and Jews, all of them, like Newton, who was the most terribleGreat Heretic, Descartes who, at least as regards animals, was a Materialist,Leibniz-God knows what he was-Galileo Galilei, who from his name must be thesophy. In 1691 Luis Spinardo, another doctor, wrote atract entitled La nueva medicina triunfante ... paraconfusion de los ruines apologistas y de Don Diego MatteoZapata (Valencia) which, in addition to describingZapata as a 'capon' and therefore better suited to musicthan medicine, accuses him of being the author of a'rationalist' defence of Galen which, in Spinardo's view,was neither rationalist nor Galenic.

26 ibid., fols 35r-36v.27 ibid., fol. 34r.28 Las Barras de Aragon (as in n. 24), p. 357.29 The letter is printed in full in Cefial (as in n. 13),pp. 34-5.30 Zapata (as in n. 25), fol. 3v.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 133arch-Jew or Proto-Hebrew and others whose very names fill one with horror'.31 Inthe eyes of even the most sober, scholastic Cartesian physics had banishedtransubstantiation to, at best, the realm of the sacramental, and Cartesian scepticismhad provided the grounding for both Jansenism and Molinism.32 As Zapata and hiscolleagues recognized, charges of heresy were the most damaging of all, and if theNew Philosophy was to survive they had to be able to answer them.One strategy, which Ficino and Erasmus had used in their attempts to legitimatePlatonic moral philosophy, was to shift attention from the substance of thearguments to the status of the person holding them. Just as for the humanistsSocrates had become a secular saint, so for the New Philosophers did Descartes. Hisideas, claimed Zapata, must be orthodox since the man who created them hadhimself led such an exemplary life. 'In his humility, modesty, ardent zeal for thepurity of the faith, obedience to the Holy See, in his prayers and observation ofdivine precepts and the frequency with which he took the sacraments Descartes ledan almost blameless life'.33 But such arguments failed to persuade. The Churchmenand the Aristotelians were fully aware that what was at issue was not the spiritual andmoral integrity of a single individual, but an entire method of describing the world.Even those among the professors and the churchmen who were prepared to listento the arguments of the New Philosophers, to the point of being persuaded bythem, frequently drew back from accepting the consequences which followed fromsuch arguments because, as the Carmelite Domingo de Santa Teresa observed, nomatter what their substance, they had been refuted a priori 'by the authority ofAristotle and St Thomas and Scotus, and all the other doctors and theologians whothought the contrary'.34But because of its connections with the court, and the apparent success of itsmedical tactics, the Regia Sociedad survived these attacks-and survives to this dayas the Real Academia de Medicina. It was the first real academy in Spain, a clearrefutation, as Zapata observed, of the remark made by the Neapolitan botanistMarcello Malpighi that of all the races of Europe only the Spaniards, the Portugueseand the Muscovites were incapable of establishing learned academies.35 It was alsocharacterized from the start, as its enemies rightly observed, by its association withforeign scholars and foreign institutions. It modelled itself on the Acadimie desSciences and the Royal Society and purchased books from both of these bodies. Itwas, as the Memorias written in 1765 proclaimed, a self-conscious part of a movementof ideas which had been born in the wake of those intellectual upheavals of the lateseventeenth century when 'it seemed as if some superior influence moved all thosespirits who were lovers of humanity so that they might co-operate for its greaterbenefit'.36 Its founder members were a heterogeneous group. There were, inaddition to Zapata and Julio Mufioz Peralta, a number of Frenchmen and, as theUniversity of Seville had complained, one Dutchman and one Englishman (though31 Los Aldeanos criticos o cartas criticas sobre lo que se vera,

Madrid 1759, p. 55.32 Diario de los literatos de Espania, Madrid 1740, vI, p.69, commenting on Juan de Najera's Desengailosphilos6phicos (see p. 136 below).33 'Alexandro de Avendailo', Didlogos philos6phicos endefensa del atomismo y repuesta a las impugnaciones

aristotelicas del R. P M. Francisco Palanco, Madrid 1716, p.7. See p. 136 below.34 Quoted in Cefial (as in n. 13), p. 27.35 Zapata (as in n. 25), fol. 1r; repeated in Ocaso de las

formas aristotlicas (as in n. 18), pp. 150-2.36 Memorias acadimicas de la Real Sociedad de Medicina ydemas Ciencias de Sevilla, I, Seville 1765, fol. 2r



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134 ANTHONY PAGDENthese must surely have been corresponding members). There was also at least onerenegade from the universitiese-Miguel Boix-described as 'a sometime professorof Alcali', which suggests that the society had from the beginning a base outsideAndalusia. There was even a canon of the Cathedral of C6rdoba and two familiaresof the Inquisition.37 The society's composition and its overt claim to be a Europeaninstitution with supra-national aspirations made it even more suspicious in the eyesof the schoolmen. As the complaints of the University of Seville had implied, allthings of foreign origin were suspected of 'novelty'. And, for most Spaniards,novelty implied instability, principally the instability associated both with religiousdissent and with unacceptable political ideologies, ideologies which privilegedeither communitarian views (Locke), individual rationalism (Hobbes), or republic-anism (Machiavelli).38 Educated Spaniards were very much aware of the degree ofcultural isolation to which this attitude subjected them. As early as 1687 the doctorand chemist Juan de Cabriada had complained that 'it is a sad and shameful thingthat, just as if we were Indians, we are the last to hear about the discoveries andenlightenment (noticias y luces) which are spreading throughout Europe'.39 'What',asked Gaspar de Jovellanos as late as 1795, of the Church's continued attempts tostop the import of foreign texts, 'will the coming generation say which despite thedespotism and the ignorance which afflict them will be more enlightened, freer andhappier than this one?'40But within the court and some of the noble households things in the earlyeighteenth century were beginning to change. Diego Zapata was the personalphysician to Cardinals Borja and Portocarrero. The former was a keen admirer ofFrench culture and had been a prominent member of the faction supporting theBourbon claim to the Spanish throne. In the closing years of Habsburg rule inSpain an increasing number of powerful individuals, known somewhat contemp-tuously by more conservative and patriotic Spaniards as los afrancesados, had come tobelieve that the only way to rejuvenate Spanish intellectual life-and with it herformer political power and economic prosperity-was the importation of Frenchcultural and political ideologies and ultimately French political institutions, a viewshared by some, at least, in Spain's Italian possession.41 The men who helped toplace a French king on the Spanish throne could also be relied upon to support theintroduction of new-or at least not so very old-ideas from France.42After the accession of Philip V the Regia Sociedad, although it retained its basein Seville, became in effect a dependency of the court with affiliations all over

37 Las Barras de Aragon (as in n. 24), p. 358.38 A similar cultural insularity also prevailed in Spain'sItalian dominions. To one such as the Neapolitanchronicler Innocenzo Fuidoro the opponents of Galenseemed to be merely 'Alchemists or Calvinists' and theirviews 'as false as heresy'. Similarly French and Englishtravellers to Naples complained that the libraries there,like the libraries in Spain, contained only books ontheology and jurisprudence. See Giuseppe Galasso,

Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello, I, Florence 1982, p. 108.39 Quoted by Emilio Balaguer Periguell, 'Ciencia eilustraci6n: la incorporaci6n de Espafia en la revoluci6nscientifica', in La ilustraci6n espailola. Actas del coloquio

celebrado en Alicante 1-4 octobre1985, eds A. Alberola andE. La Parra, Alicante 1986, p. 15.40 Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Diarios, ed. JulioSomoza, II, Oviedo 1954, p. 149.41 See Corrado Dollo, Modelli scientifici e filosofici nellaSicilia spagnola, Naples 1984, p. 228. The Sicilians andthe Neapolitans, at least after 1712, looked of course toAustria rather than France. See Anthony Pagden, 'Thedestruction of Truth, the case of eighteenth-centuryNaples', in Trust. The making and breaking of co-operativerelations, ed. Diego Gambetta, Oxford 1988.42 Las Barras de Aragon (as in n. 24), pp. 361-5.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 135Spain, and offered an alternative focus for scientific culture. Like the academies ofNaples and Sicily and the more fashionable salons (the tertulias) of early eighteenth-century Madrid, the Real Sociedad provided a refuge for the New Philosophersfrom the hatred of the university faculties and the religious orders. But that refugecould be a precarious one. Diego Zapata, one of the founder members of thesociety, personal physician not only to Borja and Portocarrero but also to the Dukeof Medinaceli, was condemned by the Inquisition in 1725 (when he was 59) forbeing a crypto-Jew and banished from Madrid.43 His patrons seem to have beenunable or unwilling to do anything to help him and he was replaced in the Duke'sservice by a common Galenic quack named Manuel de Robles.Zapata's fate indicates the social precariousness of the opposition to the oldlearning. But Zapata claims our attention for another reason. Not only was he afounder and one of the most prolific members of the Regia Sociedad, he was alsothe creator of an eclectic programme which comes closer than any other text tobeing an account of the enterprise on which the New Philosophers were engaged.Zapata's objective was to find an accepted place within the old Aristotelian academicstructure for Cartesian metaphysics and Gassendist physics. The inspiration for thissynthesis came from the work of Emmanuel Maignan, a French Minim friar who,though largely unknown today, was considered by Bayle to be the greatestphilosopher of the age.44 Maignan's Cursusphilosophicus (first printed in Toulouse in1673) was cast in the form of a textbook-which made its heterodoxy lessobvious-and was an attempt to reconcile Descartes on mind and self with anAristotelian epistemology.45 Maignan's method, like Descartes's own, proceededfrom clear and simple ideas (on the basis of which he claimed to have demonstratedthe falsity of most Cartesian physics) but they carefully skirted any discussion of thenecessary extent of Cartesian scepticism. His physics, like Gassendi's, werepredominantly atomistic and he condemned the scholastics for confusing logicaland metaphysical propositions with physical ones. The debate over the nature of theEucharist relied, he claimed, on a distinction between accident and substance whichwas merely illusory, merely voces sine re. The bread and wine, he argued, are sensibleaccidents, non ut quod, sed ut quo; that is, they are objects expressly created by God(out of a material substance) ad occultandum mysterium of the communicant. Therelationship between them was analogous to the relationship between what hecalled color in primo actu, which is identical with its substance, and color in actusecundo, where the accident produced by the reflection of the light remains (byGod's will) although the substance itself has, in fact, been transformed.46 This waslater dismissed by Jacob Brucker47 as a thesis unworthy of any philosopher, andrejected by the scholastics as little better than Descartes's own solution.48 Butit seemed to the Spanish New Philosophers at least to offer an acceptable43 The records of the trial are in Biblioteca Nacional,Madrid, MS 10.938, fols 173ff., and see Cefial (as in n.

13), p. 75.44 On Maignan see P. J. S. Whitmore, The Order ofMinims in Seventeenth-Century France, The Hague 1967,pp. 163-186.

SJ. S. Spink, French Free-Thought rom Gassendi toVoltaire, London 1960, p. 77.

46 Cursus philosophicus, Louvain 1673, pp. 583-90.47 Jacob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, Iv, Leipzig1766, p. 585.48 The Jesuit Theophile Raynaud, for instance, point-ed out that Maignan's implicit analogy with colourwould not work since the accidents of colour were

themselves a species of colour. Theologia eucharistica, inOpera omnia, vI, Lyons 1665, pp. 147-8.



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136 ANTHONY PAGDENcompromise.49 'I am neither a Cartesian nor a Gassendist', claimed Zapata, 'I am aMaignanist'.so5Zapata's own attempt to exploit Maignan came in the form of an attack on thework of another Minim, Francisco de Palanco. Palanco was one of the New Philo-sophy's most ardent opponents and certainly its most articulate. His Dialogus physico-theologicuscontraphilosophiae novatores sive Thomista contraAtomista, published in 1714,is the first wholly systematic, if not wholly original, Spanish attempt to refuteCartesian methodology and Cartesian epistemology. Zapata had met and debatedwith Palanco in the Madrid home of the Conde de Salvatierra.51 But his mostdetailed refutation is to be found in his censura of the work of Juan de Avendaijo,pseudonym for another Minim, Juan de Najera, entitled Didlogos philosdphicos endefensa del atomismo and written in 1716. Zapata's censura provided a broadprogrammatic outline for the New Philosophy. It would, he said, follow theprescriptions provided in Maignan's Cursus, its methodology would be Cartesianand its psychology dualist; but its physics was to be atomistic and would remainobedient to the Church on all matters of theology and ethics. Such a programmewould, Zapata admitted, leave very little of the Aristotelian structure standing. Butin calling the atomists 'novatores', Palanco had missed the point, since everyone inSpain knew that innovation and novelty were merely alternative descriptions ofheresy. Not only were the atomists not in any sense heretics, they were in a positionto provide the Church with a new and more compelling set of arguments for theenduring truths of the Christian religion than any derived from a now discreditedpagan philosopher.Furthermore, he argued, Palanco's attack worked with the assumption that theNew Philosophers were, like the schoolmen, faithful adherents of a single doctrine.They were not. 'There is', he wrote, 'hardly a single Cartesian who follows Rena in,for instance, identifying matter with space, there is, in a word, hardly a single Car-tesian who does not depart from his master on innumerable issues'. His was a neweclecticism. 'We seek the truth', he concluded, 'freely and dispassionately in which-ever philosopher we may find it, to do otherwise would be foolish and unworthy of aphilosopher'.52

Zapata's writings seem to have enjoyed a considerable popularity. They were notonly new and linked to far-reaching claims to medical efficacy, they were also writtenin the vernacular, in a form and style which made them far more accessible thananything the scholastics could or chose to produce. Their audience was, however,largely confined to the academy and to the drawing-rooms of the more enlightenedmembers of the nobility. For just as Cartesianism itself had had a salon existence inParis under the aegis of Sylvan Regis in the latter part of the seventeenth century, soit became a subject for fashionable debate in some of the more advanced tertulias inMadrid in the early eighteenth century.

49 On Maignan's reception in Spain see ManuelMindan, 'Las corrientes filos6ficas en la Espafia delsiglo XVIII', Revista defilosofia, xvIII, 1959, pp.471-488.50 Quoted in P. Ramon Cefial, 'Emmanuel Maignan:su vida, su obra, su influencia', Revista de estudios

politicos, XLV, 1952, pp. 111-149, at p. 142.

51 'Avendailo' (as in n. 33), pp. 57, 62. On the author-ship of the Didlogos see Ceiial (as in n. 13), p. 70.Zapata's censura occupies the first 146 pages of thebook.52 Ocaso de lasformas aristotilicas (as in n. 18), pp. 369,376.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 137Zapata's project was, however, taken up at a more formal academic level by theValencian mathematician, Tomas Vicente Tosca (1651-1723). His Compendium philo-sophiae of 172153 is the first work by a Spaniard to achieve some kind of originalsynthesis based upon broadly Cartesian principles. Like both Zapata and Najera,Tosca attacked traditional scholasticism for its dependence upon authorities, itsreliance upon texts and its attempts to describe natural phenomena by means ofabstract principles, unverified by either observation or experiment. Tosca was auniversity professor and an Oratorian but his work was not untypical of a groupwho, as the great Valencian polymath Gregorio Mayans y Siscar claimed, had shownthat Valencia was the university where the sciences had 'flourished most in the Spainof this century'.54 But in Valencia the incentive to release science from 'the thornsof scholasticism'55 came very largely from within the traditional centres of learning.Rather than seeing the accession of a Bourbon as potential for intellectual revival,the Valencians and the Catalonians saw only a threat to their cherished and hard-tried local liberties and to their local culture. Instead of the conflict between theacademies and the universities which had characterized the fortunes of the Real

Academia in Castile, in Valencia and Catalonia, both the academies and the uni-versity were prepared to collaborate upon a common scientific project.56 It was, forinstance, the university professors who very largely made up the salon of JoseCastelvi Coloma Aragon y Borja, Marquis of Villatorcas. Villatorcas was the mostpowerful of the patrons of the New Philosophy. His library contained over seventhousand printed books and manuscripts which included a volume of Spanishtranslations of the proceedings of the various academies in Paris.'57Tosca's con-temporary, the mathematician Juan Bautista Corachan (1661-1741),58 was theauthor of a work entitled Avisos de Parnaso (1690) which was claimed to have'exceeded Boccalini in its inventiveness',59 the eulogy of an eclectic collection offigures which included not only Descartes and Boyle but also the Jesuits Clavius andKircher.6o Corachin also produced the Rudimentos filosdficos, a handbook onphilosophical method, and he even attempted to provide a Spanish translation ofthe Discours although he never seems to have got beyond page two. Corachan'smethod, like Zapata's, was formally Cartesian. Argument, he claimed, could onlyproceed from clear and distinct ideas, 'for when the ideas are clear and distinct,things may be properly known and intellect cannot err except by precipitation,voluntary affectation or by some other accident'. Like Zapata's, his programme for53 A second edition edited by Gregorio Mayans ap-

peared in 1754. See J. Ma. L6pez Pinero, La introducci6nde la ciencia moderna en Espaia, Barcelona 1969, pp.144-55 and Victor Navarro Brotans, 'El compendiumphilosophicum (1721) de Tosca y la introducci6n enEspafia de la ciencia y la filosofia modernas', in Alberolaand La Parra (as in n. 39), pp. 51-70.54 In a paper on the chairs of grammar at theuniversity, Mayans singles out both Tosca and Corachain(for whom see below) as the leaders in philosophy,mathematics and theology. Epistolario, V Mayansa Nebot(1735-1742), ed. Mariano Peset, Valencia 1975, pp.92-3.55 The phrase is that of Juan Andres, a Valencian ex-Jesuit exile in Italy. 'Dell'origine, progressi e stato attu-ale d'ogni letteratura', Parma 1782. Quoted by Franco

Venturi, Settecento riformatore, Iv, Turin 1984, p. 274 andon Andres pp. 266-75.56 In general see Antonio Mestre, El mundo intelectualde Mayans, Valencia 1978.57 Cefial (as in n. 13), p. 52.58 See V. Navarro Brotans, 'La renovaci6n de las

ciencias fisico-matemiticas en la Valencia preilustrada',Asclepio, xxIv, 1972, pp. 379-89.59 By Asensio Sales, Oraci6n a la divina sabiduria patronade la Academia Valenciana, Valencia 1746, p. 12.60 It was not published, however, until 1747 and then,

significantly enough, by Mayans at the expense of theAcademia Valenciana. Corachin, like Mayans, was alsothe author of a hagiographical life of St Francis de Paulwhich prompted the young Mayans to write three saints'lives.



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138 ANTHONY PAGDENthe new learning was highly eclectic. 'I have attempted', he wrote, 'to follow thebest-known views, adhering neither to the Thomist position nor to the Suarist, sothat all may equally perceive the fruits of Philosophy without being troubled by thepassions which are commonly aroused when any one opinion is followed with toomuch enthusiasm'.61 Like Zapata, he too hoped to win over the Church by creatinga new theology which would, he claimed, be more secure in its demonstrations thanThomism had been. The vehicle for all this, which seems to have started life as acourse of instruction for the son of a local nobleman, the Count of Parsent, was tobe an academy, 'a copy of the Academy of the Nations',62 which would teachtheology, medicine and mathematics according to the new methods.

Corachin never got his academy; and his attempts, together with those of Toscaand their contemporaries, men such as Felix Falco de Belaochaga and BaltasarIiigo, to attract a wider audience for Cartesian methodology ultimately failed.Something of the project survived, however, in the Academia Valenciana founded inthe 1740s by Gregorio Mayans, the biographer of Luis Vives and editor of the firstcomplete edition of his works. Although Mayans's purpose was precisely to reviveVives's humanistic educational programme, his Academy owed much to Corachin'sinspiration, and the substance of the Avisos and the Rudimentos (both of which hehad had published) integrated into the didactic programme of the AcademiaValenciana.63

The relative success of the New Philosophy in Valencia and Catalonia was,however, circumscribed by traditional theological anxieties. Even Mayans, despitehis ambition to rejuvenate the sciences from philology to physics, remained partiallybound by the older scholasticism, especially when confronted with the the works ofthose who, in the orthodox mind, were Descartes's true progeny, Montesquieu('more diabolical than Machiavelli') and Voltaire ('one of the greatest atheists alivetoday'). Even Muratori's Filosofia morale, which Mayans had once thought to be'incomparable of its kind' and which he had even begun to translate into Spanish,was, he finally decided, too dangerous.64The initial impetus provided by the New Philosophy seems to have diminishedconsiderably by the mid-eighteenth century. Mayans's uncertainty and caution wasshared even by Feijoo who was the movement's (if it can be called a movement)most outspoken and articulate champion. Descartes, he said, 'was possessed of asublime genius, prodigious inventiveness, magnanimous resolve, extraordinarysubtlety ... but his energy overcame his temerity. He conceived projects that weretoo grand and his attacks upon received doctrine knew no bounds. From this therefollowed opinions which philosophy looks upon with wonder and religion withdistrust'65 By this time, however, those opinions had ceased to be much of a threatto either. As the Diario de los literatos noted in 1740, 'in Spain there is no need torefute Descartes or any other systematic philosopher for you will not find two61 Avisos de Parnaso, Valencia 1747, pp. 136, 153.62 In a letter to Petrei, the French professor ofmathematics at the Colegio Imperial in Madrid, quoted

by Cefial (as in n. 13), p. 54.63 See, in particular, the claims set out in Oraci6n queexhorta a seguir la verdadera idea de la eloquencia espariola,Valencia 1727, pp. 6-8.

64 Quoted by Venturi (as in n. 55), Iv, p. 268.65 Cartaseruditas as in n. 1), II, no. 16, p. 221.



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'NEW PHILOSOPHY' IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN 139people who have read his philosophy'. And, Feijoo went on, 'all those who talk ofthe philosophy of Descartes know it only through the new courses in peripateticphilosophy'.66 If this was so, their readers must have come away with a very curiousnotion of what Cartesianism was. Here, for instance, is how Luis de Losada, theJesuit author of one of the most widely read course books, the Cursus philosophicusregalis collegi Salamanticensis of 1730, glossed his countryman's view of the NewPhilosophy: 'Spaniards who hold religion most dear are commonly averse toCartesian philosophy ... and frequently call it lay philosophy, illiterate andeffeminate philosophy, or, in the speech of the vulgar, cloak and dagger philosophy,drawing-room philosophy'.'67 The charge of heterodoxy, fashionableness, the wish tocastigate all modes of secular reasoning as corrupting ('effeminate') and hardly tobe distinguished for the reader from popular romances, resonates throughout thecampaign against the New Philosophy.It was not, however, as so many contemporaries and modern historians haveclaimed, merely he presence of the Inquisition, nor the religious bigotry latent evenin the otherwise enlightened Charles III, which ultimately prevented the New Philo-sophy and later the Enlightenment from having any significant or lasting impact onSpanish (or Portuguese) intellectual life. It was the continuing presence of aninstitutionalized and once powerful intellectual tradition. The New Philosophythreatened natural-law theory and made the authorized account of the physics oftransubstantiation unworkable. It could not easily, as could Copernicanism, beaccommodated by some judicious pruning of the existing paradigms. And the veryprinciples upon which it was based, even though they ultimately provided arefutation of scepticism, did so only by first accepting the possibility of doubt. Noneo-Thomist could accept the wishes of both Descartes and his followers to detachtheology from epistemology and natural science. As even Feijoo made clear, to theorthodox any such ambition was like accepting the explanation of a navigator whoseship is off course that he was 'guiding himself by the sea not the heavens'. Thenatural philosopher 'must not lose sight of faith any more than the navigator canever ignore the position of the pole star'.68 The language of scholasticism, thecertainty of argument from authority, the centrality of matters of faith tophilosophical and scientific discussions of any kind, all survived into the earlynineteenth century. When in the latter part of the eighteenth century Cartesianismand atomism-the twin theoretical components of the New Philosophy-werethemselves undermined by Lockean psychology and Newtonian physics, Spanishneo-Thomists met this new challenge to their beliefs in real essences and secondarycauses in the same terms. Locke and Newton were (indubitably) heretics. Theirphilosophies were therefore false.Spain never experienced a 'scientific revolution' or, as we have seen, anythingwhich could plausibly be accommodated under such a description. The only'modern' science to achieve any degree of intellectual uptake (and that only at thevery end of the eighteenth century) was political economy. Men like Jovellanos andCampomanes may have made little lasting contribution to economic theory. Butthey were highly thought of in their own lifetimes and their beliefs, if not their66 Feijoo (as in n. 17), vi, pp. 76-7.67 Quoted by Cefial (as in n. 13), p. 79.

68 Teatro ritico as in n. 17), i, p. 26.



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140 ANTHONY PAGDENpolicies, met with no sustained or coherent objection. As the work of Istvan Hontand others has shown, however, political economy owed a very considerable debt tonatural jurisprudence, and if Smith's debt was to Grotius and Puffendorf, it wasequally clear that Campomanes and Jovellanos owed theirs to Suirez. But this wasprobably the one area in which the traditional discourses could be satisfactorilytranslated into a recognizably modern idiom.69In all other areas of learning the power and direction of the older methods ofexplanation-sustained as they were by a powerful central state which drew much ofits stability and its legitimacy from a Church which, in one way or another, was inretreat all over Europe -ultimately made any long-term compromise with the newimpossible. As the author of the article on scholastic philosophy in the Encyclopidiecaustically observed, the study of philosophy in Spain and Portugal was 'still in thesame condition as it was among us between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Theprofessors swear to teach nothing new and take every precaution they can againstenlightenment. It is impossible to read without pain and astonishment, in one ofthe learned journals for 1752, the title of a book recently published in Lisbon-inthe middle of the eighteenth century -Systema aristotelicum deformis substantialibusetc. cum dissertatione de accidentibus, Lisbon 1750, which one is tempted to think mustbe a misprint for 1550'.70 His pain and astonishment would have been deepenedstill further by the Plan de estudios drawn up by the University of Salamanca in 1771which declared: 'We cannot separate ourselves from the peripatetic system... Themodern philosophies are not adapted to the ends which the study [of arts] isintended to obtain... The systems of Gassendi and Descartes do not resemblerevealed truth so much as that of Aristotle.... Even when we disregard this obstacle,which is alone sufficient to exclude such principles from Catholic classrooms, wefind that these systems function upon voluntary principles from which are deducedvoluntary and unconvincing conclusions'.7' It was ajudgement upon the intellectuallife of the nation.KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

69 Hont and Ignatieff (as in n. 11). The indebtednessof the Spanish political economists to the Spanishnatural-law tradition has yet to be explored, but seeGirolamo Imbruglia, 'Qualche nota sul Conde diCampomanes', Rivista storica italiana, xclv, 1982, pp.204-226.

70 Encyclopidie ou dictionnaire raisonni des sciences, des artset des metiers, Paris 1755, v, p. 304.71 Plan de estudios dirigida a la universidad de Salamancaprinted in G. Addy, The Enlightenment in the University ofSalamanca, Durham N.C. 1966, p. 252.

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